Goaod afternoon. I'm Dan Rizzo with Jefferies Equity Research. Presenting now is AptarGroup, and with us today is CEO Stephan Tanda and CFO Vanessa Kanu. There'll be a presentation, but there should be time at the end for questions. With that, I will turn it over to Stephan. Thanks.
All right, Dan, thanks for having us. It's my pleasure to introduce you to AptarGroup. It's, I think, our inaugural presence at this conference. The reason is quite simple. Our pharma business today is our greatest, largest business, and almost 70% of our EBITDA comes from our pharma business. Fundamentally, we are a technology company. We create proprietary drug delivery systems that are in the drug master file and stay with the product for life, whether it's in the originator phase, in the generic phase, or over the counter. We're also a sustainability leader, thanks in part to our deep European roots. We've been around for 80 years, public for 32, and sustainability is in our genes, quite simply because it's a competitive advantage, and it's required not only by our consumer customers, but also by our increasingly pharma customers in the consumer healthcare space.
It is very much a motivating factor for our employees. Here you get a sense for all the clients we have if we deal with all the world's major pharma companies, generic companies, consumer companies. You see our base in Europe at about 50%, 30% in the U.S., the balance in Latin America and Asia. You see our financial results in terms of the columns here. That is not how the company operates. From a technology point of view, you look at any Aptar location, we do the same fundamental processes: precision injection molding, followed by highly automated, high-speed assembly, and AI-assisted quality control. Whether a fine mist pump started out in beauty as a fragrance pump, today it is a nasal spray or is used in the food industry, the fundamentals of the pump are the same.
Of course, as we get closer to the end application, it is much more tailored to that end application. Clearly, we manage by these technology platforms in addition to the end markets. With that, I hand over to our CFO, Vanessa, to talk a little bit about our long-term targets.
Just to give you a bit of a background around our targets, we initially set out some long-term targets in 2021 and revised them in 2023. In that revision, we increased the expected growth rate for our pharma business by about 100 basis points. We increased the growth rate for pharma from a revenue growth perspective to 7%-11%. We also, at that time, increased the Adjusted EBITDA target for the company by also 100 basis points, as well as the return on invested capital by about 100 basis points.
What I would say is, if you go back and look at our historical track record, pharma, for example, particularly if you look at the last 10 years or so, the actual CAGR, of course, the annual revenue growth varies year by year, but the actual CAGR over that time horizon has been about 8%, so well within that range. When you look at our 2024 results, our profitability has certainly been within our long-term Adjusted EBITDA target range, and our ROIC has actually been increasing for the last couple of years. We have been in the target range as well, and we ended 2024 at about 12.5% return on invested capital. Our closures business is more recently now coming in line with its long-term target range, and we expect that performance to be a lot more consistent going forward.
In the beauty side of the business, we've been challenged on the top line for various reasons. However, we've done a lot of productivity work in our beauty business. As the market demand starts to come back, we certainly do expect improved performance from beauty and certainly to start to track closer to its long-term targets over time. We have followed a very disciplined and consistent and intentional capital allocation strategy. If you look at our capital allocation, it's been fairly well balanced between returns or capital invested back into our business through organic investments as well as M&A and also capital return to shareholders. Historically, we've had about a 70-30 mix. When you look at this slide here, it's actually talking more to the shareholder side of the equation. We are a dividend aristocrat, as you can see on the slide.
This is our 32nd consecutive year of paying an annually increasing dividend, and certainly we hope that continues. When you look at 2019- 2024, we've returned about $800 million to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. When you look at Q1 2025, the quarter just ended, we actually returned about $110 million of capital to shareholders, roughly $80 million of buybacks and about $30 million of dividends. Very strong balance sheet, low leverage. You would have seen on the previous slide that our leverage corridor that we've targeted for ourselves is 1x-3x, and we're currently at the end of Q1 at just under 1.2x leverage. Very low leverage, strong cash flows, which obviously gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of the ability to invest back in our business as well as return capital back to shareholders.
Stephan, with that, I'll pass it back to you.
Thank you, Vanessa. Here a bit more on sustainability. Of course, you see a lot of recognitions by publications, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Barron's for many years. In addition to that, or maybe more importantly, the very serious rating agency, most importantly, EcoVadis and CDP have rated us platinum for EcoVadis. That gives you a sense that's the top 1% of what they rate. And we've been several years a platinum company and CDP also several years, A-list as well as a sustainability leadership. I forgot the term for it. That's really important, as I said, for our customers, for their brand leadership, and very important to recruit and retain young talent, particularly around the world. We've done sustainability long before ESG became a word in the U.S., and we will keep doing it long after because it's the right thing and it's a competitive weapon.
Let me dig into our pharma business a little bit. I talked about proprietary drug delivery systems being the cornerstone. Sometimes I say that's where we print the money and injectables we make the money. So proprietary drug delivery system, extremely important. You see how our pharma business has evolved from being roughly 20% of the company or a third of the company to now being almost 50% of the company through the addition of the injectable business via acquisition in 2012, the active material business in 2018, and very robust organic growth. Let me spend some time on this. Basically, the building blocks for our growth are that we make very precise, technologically deep components that we own the IP of. So we're not in the CMO business. We're not in the CDMO business. We create the devices. We own the IP for these devices.
We have very long-ranging, and I'm talking many decades, expertise around how these things are regulated, how you get a medication approved as a combination medicine from API to formulation to the drug delivery component, and then it's anchored in the drug master file. Over the years, we've built the whole service package around that. As you know, most of the innovation today is from small companies. We call them two people in the molecule, and we take folks, those two people in the molecule from ideation to approval of the medication that if it's really fast, like in the case of ADAPT today, Emergent Biosolutions, six years from ideation to FDA approval. If it takes Provato with J&J, it took 12 years. Of course, it didn't start out with J&J, but with predecessor entities. Sometimes it can take 15 years.
During that time, we provide services, we provide expertise, we provide the materials to go in the clinic. It is not that we dig a hole during that time, but the real money is being made once the product launches and is successful, and then we basically have a growing perpetuity. We have added also digital services over the years. Today, most new product launches have a digital companion. Some of these apps are actually FDA-approved medical devices. We have a Chief Medical Officer to oversee that activity. Importantly, if you sign up with a partner for a decade or two decades, you want to make sure they are around. Now, given our balance sheet, very conservative balance sheet and our 80-year track record, we are the partner that people want to be when they develop their new innovative drug product and support them over the decades.
Some of the growth drivers are macro trends, if you want. The nose has been discovered not only to treat the sniffles, but also as a very efficient delivery mechanism to the brain and into the bloodstream. The capillary intensity in our nasal cavities is very high. So pain medication, of course, Narcan, you know very well in the U.S., Spravato, diazepam, also hypoglycemic treatment, Paximi. Pharma companies just find it very appealing to take an approved molecule with a proven safety record, proven pharmacokinetics, and change the delivery method to one that's more consumer-friendly. Take NEFI, nasally delivered epinephrine. And then if you want lifecycle manage that drug and get another 10 years, 12 years, 15 years life out of that drug with a new delivery method, number one. Number two, our big allergic rhinitis franchise keeps growing quite simply because allergies keep becoming worse and worse.
It's part of the human condition, maybe driven by climate change. On top of that, we have geographic growth. Asia is also joining the ranks of sufferers of allergies more and more and with a growing business in China. I have already talked about the progression in our business as things go generic and over the counter. Basically for us, that means more volume, same pricing, same margin structure. Last but not least, of course, we also with our injectable business benefit from the growth of biologics, including GLP-1 drugs. Next to targets, we also have a track record. You see our growth over the last decade, plus 9% top line growth that's organic, as well as 9% EBITDA growth. To give you some comfort that this will continue, like any pharma business, we are a pipeline-based business.
We give you the makeup of the pipeline every year in terms of number of opportunities and risk-adjusted value. Given that the products we have out there do not just drop off a patent cliff, but are basically growing perpetuities, all this pipeline adds and makes us confident about the 7%-11% top line growth. Peeling back the onion a little bit more, there you see the kinds of products we are on. Again, we do not make the package. We make what is on top of the container, the nasal spray, the Narcan, the inhaler. Again, it is the valve. Right now, there is a big transition going on with inhalers to a new propellant with less global warming potential. The FDA has even contracted us to help them manage that transition. In recent decades, we have added ophthalmic eye care products to the portfolio as well as central nervous system drugs.
That gives you a sense of the kinds of things that we used to do, and now we've added to that central nervous system, also vitamin supplementation with nasally delivered vitamins, for example. Talking about injectables, we are in most of the auto injectors, either the plunger or the needle shield, support vaccines, small molecules, anti-thrombotics, blood factors, a little bit of animal health. In the injectable business, as you know, there are fundamentally six SKUs. There's the plunger that's inside the syringe. There's the stopper that's on top of the vial, and there's the needle shield. You can have them coated or uncoated, ready to use, meaning sterilized or not. We drive more and more towards high-value products.
COVID has really helped this business to become visible to the whole industry from a technical capability point of view, and the technical capability is the same as the market leader. To some of the numbers, let me not go into that. We've put massive investment into that business, a business that used to be $250 million. We invested $200 million in CapEx to have significant growth capacity, have assets in place in China, in Europe, in the U.S., and basically full participant in the market. Last but not least, a more recent acquisition, active materials. It's a little bit harder to understand, but basically think of it as a polymer that creates a condition in an enclosed space. Enclosed space can be a vial for diabetes test strips.
It can be a package where the puck for Abbott Libre is conditioned before you put it on your skin, or it could be a blister where Gilead's Discovery drug lives very happy and maintains its efficacy until you use it. It is a very science-deep solution-oriented product line that we highlight here, the pharma application, but it also has food safety applications. We also sell this stuff in food enclosures applications. A few words about beauty. You see here many of our products. Again, we do not make the full product. We do not make the bottles. We make what is on top of the bottles. That is really what creates a consumer experience. Not only have we people who know everything there is about systemic drug delivery, we also have people who know everything there is to know about how to apply a fragrance and how to apply a skincare product.
It is a deep end-use expertise that allows us to grow the company. Beauty is no different. We have done a lot of work to renovate the beauty business. It was a bit under-investment for some period of time. We have closed 10 plants, shifted the footprint more to the growing areas. Today, we feel quite good about the capability of that team. We need a little bit of help from the market. Let me put it this way. Tariff history on it is not helping. You do not launch a new high-end fragrance when you pay 50% tariffs one day and 10% the next day. Hopefully, this will have settled out by the second half of the year for this business to continue to get back on a growth track. Last but not least, often people remember us by this picture.
Ketchup bottle used to be upside down. Now it's upside up. Now it's upside down. It's just one example of how we convert categories. Most recently, actually, the dish soap category has been converted together with Procter & Gamble. Basically, we create a different consumer experience and that allows us to grow in categories that tend to be slow-growing, like dish soap, like baby nutrition, like sunscreen. If you convert large categories like that, that drives the growth of our closures business. With that, Dan, we're ready for your questions.
Okay, thanks. If you do have questions, just raise your hand and I'll shout them up. I don't think there's a mic in the room, but I'll start. You mentioned that there's an effect of tariffs on the beauty business. Could you just tell us if there's any other effect elsewhere? I think you probably sell and produce locally, but I was wondering if tariffs ever have any effect on pharma as well.
Yeah, so we got to bifurcate between effect on us and an effect on our customers. The effect on us is rather limited. We've had a long history of having an industrial footprint that is making in the region for the region. We produce in China for China. We're not in China to export. We produce in India for India. We produce in the U.S. for the U.S. and in Europe for Europe. That means we ship very little across regions. What tariffs we do incur, we pass on to our customers as a surcharge. It's a line item, and there's very little pushback. Everybody knows what's going on. Now, for our customers, of course, they do cross-ship. Sometimes it's benign. We sell some food customers who fill products in Mexico, like coffee, and then they ship it all to the U.S.
It's on the USMCA, no big deal. A beauty customer for a beauty brand made in Paris or filled in Paris is important for a high-end fragrance. If you go to the duty-free store and pay $250, $300 for a fragrance, it better come from Paris. It shouldn't come from Cincinnati. That needs to be shipped to the U.S., and that will attract a tariff. That creates some uncertainty for our customers. The same is true for some pharma customers. Some of the nasal sprays are being filled in France and shipped to the U.S. by our customers. They have a bit more space in the P&L to absorb those tariffs in the short term, and they're not going to change their supply chain strategy overnight. We will see secondary, tertiary effects once there's some clarity about the regime.
We are quite happy to shift our supply that if GSK tomorrow says, "We do not want to fill this in France anymore. We would rather fill this in the U.S.," then said, "We are happy to sell you those products from our U.S. factories." Every single unit operation can be moved. We cannot move the whole buildings, but many unit operations we can move and realign supply chain. It takes years to move factories. They will not be moved based on a tweet.
You mentioned one area of growth is taking existing products and changing the delivery system. Oops, is there a question?
That's okay.
All right, just one second, and I'll let you go. I'm sorry, I didn't see you back there. You mentioned that there's a big area of growth is the change in delivery systems for existing products. I was wondering if that possibly has a shorter approval process because the NDA or the underlying drug already exists.
Not really. In the end, what is approved is the medicine. Certainly, the safety package can be abbreviated. Naloxone has been around forever. You don't have to redo the safety package for Naloxone, but still, if it's now delivered through the nose rather than through injection, what is the absorption rate? What is the distribution in the nasal cavity? If I stay with Narcan, you need to prove 99.999% industrial reliability of the device firing. You don't want to try to bring somebody back from near death and the device misfiring. It is still a pretty involved approval process. Having said that, we do have a new system out for generic approvals, staying with the same drug, with the same delivery mechanism where people can maybe get their approval in silico and don't have to retest in vivo. We offer that out to our customers.
It was mentioned in the last queue. Was the question in the back?
You mentioned more climate-friendly propellant gases for inhalation products. How do you see this developing, and do you see a difference between Europe and the U.S.?
Not really. We work with customers in Europe and in the U.S. on this, as well as with generic players in India. In the end, about my generation, you may remember the Montreal Protocol when we all discovered that propellants eat up the ozone layer, and there are just successive waves of more environmentally friendly propellants. We were at the forefront the last time this happened. Now we are going on to the next generation. It is really all producers who are going to jump to the next one. Yes?
In terms of the capacity additions and investment you've put on the injectable side, how long does that take until you start to see those new products ramp in those facilities and start to see through the P&L?
Yeah, so we gave about $180 million, probably, but now it's $200 million enveloped. Those investments happened in multiple steps in multiple locations, some here in Congers, New York, a big new state-of-the-art building in Granville, France, but also other locations in France and then in China. The answer is progressive as these steps come online. When I talk about the big building, it starts to have the first equipment in there late last year that's validated and is ready to go probably as we speak or into the second half of the year. Today, except for ramping up some of the equipment, we're not capacity constrained. We just grow with the market.
Hi, sorry. Are there any other sub-market growth potentials within the nasal portfolio given if, take for example, the shift from preservative-containing to preservative-free nasal sprays for allergic rhinitis? Are there any other kind of sub-markets like that where you're seeing higher growth potential?
We have a ton and a ton of projects in the pipeline. Most of them we can't talk about, but some of them are in the public domain. People work on nasally delivered GLPs. People work on Parkinson and Alzheimer treatments through nasal spray. People work on all kinds of things. It is extremely hard to predict which ones of these are going to be winners. If you would ask us in 2018, whether Spravato is going to be a winner, we would have said, "Hey, obvious. It helps prevent suicide." It basically was a dead cat bounce when it was launched. Now it's a blockbuster. All of a sudden, it grows like crazy, and J&J is very proud of it, and we are very happy with it. NEFI, it's still very early days. Is it going to be successful?
A doctor is going to write the scripts, or a payer is going to reimburse it? For us, this is more numbers games, but over time, we see many more indications. In the end of the day, this is an instrument to get in the bloodstream very quickly and to get to the brain very quickly. People are very creative. What else to do?
Okay, so can you just talk a little bit about your licensing service revenue? Are royalty payments becoming much, much more important? Is it something you would rather have, or would you rather have them basically cut you a check, or does it depend?
Yeah, I mean, we tend to be good in the casino. When two people with a molecule come to us and want us to work on a project, we'd rather get the service revenue. That is our first preference. Sometimes they say, "We can't afford this," or, "We'd rather give you some piece of the action at the back end." We do date that as well, and sometimes we get lucky. Right now, we have a lucky streak.
It's not something you want to do on a regular basis?
No.
Now, you have a large pipeline and a large number of products. Is there any one product? I mean, what's the largest contribution from one product to even onto sales?
Yeah, I mean, no single customer is larger than 3% of revenue. I would say no single product is about in the same order of magnitude. We have thousands of products, thousands of customers. The concentration risk is pretty low.
Okay, any more questions from the audience?
One more.
One back.
Can you speak a little bit more to your digital health business? I know there was a recent deal announced with a pharma company, but what's your view on the growth trajectory of that business and the investment you're planning to make in that space given regulatory challenges and all the other factors?
Yeah, so we have a long history there. Initially, we started with an in-house effort to enable some of our delivery devices. For example, one device has a lockout mechanism for dispersement of pain medication, opioids, and you cannot activate it after a certain time has elapsed. We had tracking of how you take your medication and ensure compliance with clinical trials. We acquired a publicly traded company called Volantis. There was a pioneer in this space of making apps to accompany oncology treatment or accompany diabetes treatment, sound to track side effects.
This has progressed more and more to manage digital assets, companion apps to new drug launches, to the point where some drug companies like Biogen, we announced, kind of turn over their whole digital effort to us and say, "Please manage that for us." As you know, there's a lot that goes with that: HIPAA, GDPR. We have a team that's very knowledgeable in managing that. It used to be very expensive marketing support. Today, it's a nice business in its own right. It allows us to get more projects because we can really deal with drug companies from ideation to development to getting the companion apps to having trainers for an auto injector for a nasal device that goes out at the same time and then track compliance with the treatment regime.
If you retain a patient even six months longer than they would have otherwise, that's a lot of money for the drug companies. They really appreciate that additional offering.
In terms of capital allocation, with acquisitions, are there any specific areas of more interest or increasing interest? How do you think about valuation of that versus kind of the recent buyback you have been doing?
Yeah, so I mean, certainly our preferential capital allocation, whether that's for CapEx or whether for its M&A, is clearly preferably looked to the pharma business. And when you look historically, what we've done, certainly, let's say 60%-70% of the capital went to the pharma business in recent years, including M&A. We continue to have a very active business development M&A effort. We've done a ton of smaller deals. The bigger deals are harder to do with valuations that make sense for us. We're certainly not out there buying things for 20x-25x . The last big deal we did at 13x . Clearly, the discretionary part of our capital allocation, if there's no big deal, is buying back more stock. We've been more active in the market recently, as you've seen.
All right, we are out of time. I want to thank you both for coming, and thanks everyone for attending. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.